Political Quotes

“I appreciate my colleague pointing out the fact that we did have some areas in North Carolina. Indeed, two of the counties that he mentioned were in my district, because of the rain that we had recently. But, you know, declaring a disaster and allocating money to those counties are two different things. I would bet--and I'm sorry I don't have time to do it while we're here on the floor, but I bet it'll be 18 months before any of those people see a dime of the money because the bureaucracy is so incompetent in terms of responding to people. So the money won't be given out for a long, long time from those disasters, unfortunately, because usually when there is a disaster, people need help right away, but it doesn't get done. We could have gone through regular order on this. There's no reason not to have gone through regular order. But what you wanted to do was get this jobs money out there, is my guess, so that you could declare jobs being created through more government funding. Madam Speaker, I was in the Congress when Katrina hit, and here's what happened. We were on August break. Katrina hits on Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The Speaker of the House, Mr. Hastert, had a conference call on Wednesday of that week and he said, I either can call everybody back into session and we will allocate the $10 billion that needs to be allocated for Katrina right now, in an emergency, or we can have unanimous consent, no one will come forward and object. I will bring a few people back in.…”